The round values Leverage Edu at roughly $120 million.
Investors participating in the round included Kaizenvest Private Equity, DSP Mutual Fund Group, Artha India Ventures, UAE-based NB Ventures, and 9Unicorns. Existing investors including Blume Ventures, DSG Consumer Partners and Tomorrow Capital, also participated.
Chona Group (the company behind Havmor), consumer goods player Vicco, Mankind Pharma, and other family offices joined the round along with Trifecta Ventures and Bennett Coleman (The Times Group), the company said. The round also saw prominent startup founders including Cred’s Kunal Shah, BookMyShow’s Ashish Hemrajani, True North partner Haresh Chawla, Lenskart’s Peyush Bansal, and ShareChat’s Farid Ahsan invest in the company.
Leverage Edu said it would use the funds to grow in existing geographies of Australia, India and Nigeria to bolster its student network, and look at an initial launch in new countries, including the US.
Founded in April 2017, Leverage Edu’s core business helps prominent universities onboard students from emerging economies. For students, it has built a technology-led counseling platform that gives them a one-stop dashboard for their entire study-abroad journey.
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“We have grown more than 12-fold in revenue between February 2021 and 2022, and have crossed an annualised revenue milestone of $20 million. The team has cut customer acquisition costs with over 20% of our business now coming from referrals. Another 35% comes from a bunch of slick product-channels like virtual fair platform UniConnect, IELTS-prep product Leverage Live, among others,” said Akshay Chaturvedi, founder and chief executive, Leverage Edu.
At present, the company has onboarded more than 400 universities globally on its platform. In September 2021 Leverage Edu had announced that it had opened an office in the United Kingdom. It also opened an office in Australia last week to build products for streamlining admissions, marketing automation, and to better serve universities in these regions.
The company claims it has placed over 12,000 students across various global universities to date.
This year, Leverage Edu also announced its foray into financial services and is awaiting a full-fledged money changer (FFMC) license from the Reserve Bank of India to foray into the foreign remittance business.
The company also helps students secure loans for education through its partners and aims to facilitate a loan book of Rs 500 crore by September. It is looking to also apply for a non-banking finance company (NBFC) license in the next two months.
It competes with edtech startup Leap, which also helps Indian students with their study abroad journey through LeapScholar. In September 2021, Leap raised $55 million in a funding round led by Owl Ventures.
Disclaimer: Brand Capital, the strategic investment arm of the Times Group, which also publishes ETtech, is one of the investors in this round.
